WolframAlpha Really Analyzes Your Facebook Data, Perhaps too Well.

WolframAlpha is well known in the scientific and academic communities as a rather useful tool for checking certain equations and getting scientific answers. In general, it’s a pretty useful tool for academics and the company is moving towards employing their knowledge engine towards more of an analytics business where they can help collect and analyze data as well as answer questions.

Now, WolframAlpha has pointed their analytics tools and capabilities towards a less noble and productive cause, Facebook. By doing this WolframAlpha is enabling the world to see what they can do with raw data and how they can transform simple user data into trends and graphs that users can easily break down. Really, it’s a great promotional tool. This tool is unlike every other tool out there that actually claims to tell you who is your biggest commenter, or what your most popular post is. WolframAlpha is a real data company with real analytics.

Now, in order to use this tool, you simply need to head over to WolframAlpha and type in ‘My Facebook’ into the search. If you’re really lazy, we’ve already got the search query entered in for you here.

Once you’ve done that, you need to allow WolframAlpha to connect to your Facebook and to create an account on WolframAlpha, yet another brilliant idea of theirs. Building their userbase, even if most of those users will never do anything beyond Facebook.

Now, once you’ve done that it will download all of your Facebook data in the last year or so. It will take that data and break it down into a bunch of categories with different subsets. Below we have some screenshots with some personal information redacted for private reasons.

The data generated above was actually from the second time that we ran this tool on WolframAlpha. The first time that we ran this tool, we actually got some incomplete data. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a Facebook whore, so when I saw gaps in my Facebook data I realized that this tool is not entirely finished, yet.

Some other interesting metrics that WolframAlpha pulls up are most commented pictures, top commenters, most active Facebook apps, Weekly Interface Activity (FB.com vs Mobile), Friends’ gender, Friends’ Relationship Statuses, Most popular friends’ names and many many useless but amusing statistics.